


the ever-living ghost of what once was

by slybrunette



Category: Chuck (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-29
Updated: 2012-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-30 06:57:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/329018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post finale. this is the first day of your life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the ever-living ghost of what once was

and there's distance and there's silence  
your words have never left me  
( **new york; snow patrol** )

 

 

 

**o n e**

 

 

This is the first day of your life.

 

 

 

 

As a child, Sarah rode her bike into oncoming traffic. 

Never let it be said that she isn’t resilient.

 

 

 

 

Chuck falls into traps.

Says _remember that_ only to catch himself seconds later and eons too late.

Says _sorry_ and brushes his hands against hers, tries to cover them, tries to heal wounds he can’t touch much less begin to fix. Tries to hold her there, to ground her, and she imagines that he believes it to be for her benefit instead of his own. 

She fights the urge to retreat.

 

 

 

 

_Remember that._

_It all started with a guy who worked at a Buy More._

_Remember that._

_Remember the seconds ticking down on that clock, remember our hands intertwined in that motel room, remember me down on one knee in the hospital waiting room, remember when we almost ran away and the reasons we didn’t and the way we held onto each other._

_Remember that._

 

 

 

 

“It’s okay,” she says.

She gives the tan jacket he marks as familiar, as a memory held close, to Goodwill. 

She lets her hair grow out again and leaves the wedding ring on the nightstand and kisses a man she doesn’t love out of guilt.

“It’s okay, Chuck,” she says, and hopes he can’t feel her fingers twitch away from his grasp, the last of her will before it gives out.

 

 

 

 

She’s beginning to think her predecessor had it out for her. 

She’s beginning to think of herself as altogether separate from the woman who lived here. 

Here as in Echo Park, a subsection of Burbank, a subsection of California, a subsection of the United States. 

Here as in this body, behind these hands, these eyes, this mouth. 

“You wanted to start a family,” he tells her. “You wanted to leave the spy life behind and you wanted…we were going to start over. We weren’t going to be these people anymore.”

“Oh,” she exhales. 

Doesn’t say _that doesn’t sound a thing like me_. 

Doesn’t feel the connection between that woman and herself. 

Doesn’t feel anything at all, actually.

 

 

 

 

Sarah buys a plane ticket under the name of Jenny Burton and hides it in the third desk drawer, under a stack of paperwork that she comes to identify as a scrapped plan for a tech company that never came to be, a location that serves its purpose well. 

(There are some things that Chuck simply can’t bear to look at and they are, in ascending order: that stack of papers and the accompanying word document; the house with the red door; her bare third finger.

She learns.)

Sarah dials a number and hangs up when the voice on the other end of the line is not that of her long-dead partner’s. 

(There is no grave, he tells her.

There was no body recovered, so there was no grave, not the second time, and if she cries on the bed then she cries on the bed, but he is not there to see her do it.)

Sarah endures long, invasive visits from Chuck’s friends and Chuck’s family, people who treat her as one of their own, as if that’s what she would want, as if it would make her feel more comfortable, as if it would not make her feel like an imposter in her own skin.

(“He calls sometimes,” Alex says, on one such visit, Morgan in the living room, Alex in the kitchen with her, watching her, talking to her; and then, as if she had asked, “I think he misses you.”

She does not ask _do you miss him too?_ and even if she had Sarah would not have a concrete answer for her. He is to her a vague idea of a man, split by the stories she’s been told and the ones she remembers, but there is a distinctive pull present, when she thinks of him, the same as the one present when she thinks of Chuck, only minus the expectations, the investment, the weight of his gaze on her as she tries and fails to live up to a woman who now only occupies his mind and the wide open spaces of his dreams.

She does not think of him often.

She does not think of him at all.)

Sarah reaches out to her father, to Carina, to people who did not factor frequently in the last five years, only to find they’ve changed too, with time and distance and experience. Tries desperately to connect to her past.

Can’t.

 

 

 

 

He doesn’t touch her.

Not in that way, not in the way you’d expect of two people who sleep in the same bed most nights. His hands do not fit between her legs and his mouth does not stutter between her breasts, and it’s not because he doesn’t want her, and it’s not because he’s forgotten how to want her, it’s because he’s afraid. 

He is afraid of hurting her, of scaring her off, of losing her.

She has made him afraid.

 

 

 

 

_I’m here for you always_ , he says, on the beach that means something she cannot touch and he cannot give her.

She buys a plane ticket and lets two months’ time pass and then finds herself standing in an airport, having made no such promise in return.

 

 

 

 

_I’m sorry_ , the note reads.

Two simple words, all-encompassing and absent context, written on scrap paper and left on the nightstand with the ring.

_Remember that._

 

 

 

 

This is the first day of your life.

 

 

 

 

**t w o**

 

 

Casey’s’ don’t run.

Good thing he’s a Coburn.

 

 

 

 

He needed to leave.

He needed to not be in Burbank for reasons he’d rather not put a name to, and there was a standing offer waiting in the wings. He packed his bags. He handed over his keys to Grimes. He promised his daughter he would call. He hopped a flight to Dresden and got the girl, as much as a woman like Gertrude can be _got_.

It’s all very simple.

 

 

 

 

By the time he arrives, she’s already been shot once. 

Right shoulder, just a graze, not near enough to deter her from punching out a guy, only to steal his own gun and shoot him with it. 

“About time you showed up,” Gertrude says, and Dresden’s cold but she isn’t, her touch warm, her eyes alive, and she tells him they’ll be moving on soon, tells him he made it in just under the wire but after the fireworks.

In time to see yet another curtain come down.

“I’ve missed you,” she says.

He has not yet broken the habit of replying to such declarations with a simple _thank you_. 

That he replies to them at all is something owed to those he left behind in Burbank.

 

 

 

 

“Mission went south,” he tells her, on the occasion that she asks.

Adds a shrug to go with his nonchalance. 

She’s not calling him a liar.

But.

 

 

 

 

He calls Alex weekly, first from Dresden, then from Marseille, Manila, a brief stopover in Buenos Aires, everywhere but within the country he held so dear and fought so hard for, and there’s irony to be found there, he’s been told, but he sure as hell isn’t laughing. 

“She’s doing better,” his daughter says, as if he had asked, as if he needed to know. “Most days.”

The _she_ in question is implied.

He didn’t run off to the other side of the world without learning a few things about the way his daughter’s mind works first. 

She didn’t let him run off to the other side of the world without learning a few things about how to get to him first. 

 

 

 

 

They’re still in Buenos Aires the first time they fight and don’t fuck. 

(A consistent pattern, a constant, the spread of her legs and the force of her mouth directly connected to the tone of his voice, the more dangerous the better, and there are certain merits to that sort of arrangement, but he hadn’t tested the long term of it all before jumping in with both feet.

He had just left.

Had just run.)

There had been an ambush, ten on two. He had warned her. She had ignored him. She has been making a career out of ignoring him, whether it’s his advice or his rules, and the thrill is in the chase some idiot once said, but he’s getting too old to be running this hard and this fast for this long.

Gertrude throws a bottle at his head and the glass shatters against the wall, liquid spilling out and pooling on the wooden floor, soaking into the fringed edges of the rug.

He says: _that was a perfectly good bottle of tequila you just wasted_.

She says: _I’m in charge here_ , the unspoken being _and don’t you forget it_ , the unspoken being _and don’t you forget that you don’t have to be here at all_.

 

 

 

“Are you happy, dad?”

 

 

 

 

_What do you remember about me?_

Her eyes reflected her answer to the only parts he cared about.

Her eyes reflected him, the vague shape of him, fuzzy around the edges, unconcerned about the details. 

(Know this:

The same part of him that blames Chuck for not letting him go after Quinn the first time, for getting himself kidnapped, for getting Sarah in the position where the Intersect became her only viable option, is the same part that finds blame within himself. 

He should’ve never listened to Chuck in the first place. He should’ve tried harder to stop her from downloading it. He should’ve fought harder. He shouldn’t have gone soft. 

He shouldn’t have left.)

_We became friends_ , he said. 

The flicker of pain that followed, the tell that followed, is something he has come to regret.

 

 

 

 

“You clearly have some unfinished business to attend to.”

Gertrude hands him a plane ticket.

_This is your out._

It is the last gift she’ll ever give him.

 

 

 

 

“I’m fine, honey.”

 

 

 

 

He leaves.

He does not return to Burbank, to California, to the United States. 

Time has given him the capability to admit certain things to himself, even if he cannot admit them to others.

Chief among them:

_I miss you._

(“We became friends,” he’d said, and remained a stranger. 

“I’m fine, honey,” he’d said, and heard the sigh of relief that follows the internal monologue of _be okay be okay be okay_.

He learns.)

 

 

 

 

Casey’s’ don’t run.

As it turns out, Coburn’s do.

 

 

 

 

**t h r e e**

 

 

 

Sarah returns to the CIA, the way one returns to a beloved home town, to the family they left behind. 

They are the ones who will take you in, when no one else will.

She doesn’t have anyone else. 

_I’m here for you always._

She is alone. 

 

 

 

 

They send her to Cartagena on the trail of an arms dealer, two months of deep cover and a chance to rise in the ranks if the mission succeeds. 

She is unquestioning about her orders. 

Casey had been right in that respect. 

 

 

 

 

(She does not think of him often.

She does not think of him at all.)

 

 

 

 

Sarah does stupid things like buy a postcard from a vendor on the side of the road and send it to Burbank, to the man that loves her in Burbank.

Sarah does stupid things like bite her bottom lip until it bleeds to keep her hands from shaking, from showing in her penmanship.

Sarah does stupid things like leave it unsigned, as if that is saving anyone from anything. 

 

 

 

 

A woman stops her on the street.

An unfamiliar woman with short dark brown hair calls her Sarah on the streets of Cartagena, on the streets of a city where her name is Lisa. 

“You must have me confused with someone else,” she tells her. 

The woman’s smile falters and she nods to herself, as if finally putting together the pieces of a puzzle that Sarah is not privy to. 

 

 

 

 

Two months of pretending to be someone else is a short sentence.

At least, when compared to a lifetime.

 

 

 

 

Memories return in snippets. 

(Wearing half of a pink bridesmaids dress and getting soaked by the fire sprinklers;

The workings of the frozen yogurt machine at the Orange Orange;

Calling a man Frank and finding his reaction simultaneously amusing and terrifying, remembering nothing of his face save for the eyes, concern twisted with a modicum of unrestrained fear;

Kissing Bryce in a bedroom that closely resembles the one she left behind in Burbank;

Watching a car explode and feeling everything inside of her give all at once.)

She never remembers specifics, can never put together a convincing timeline. 

Chuck had told her stories that he tried hard to keep chronological, but he remembered them in terms of importance rather than time, and some of these gaps were not his to fill to begin with.

She knows the Orange Orange came after the Wienerlicious.

She does not know if she was kissing Bryce before or after he died the first time. She does not know who was in the car or whose eyes had the power to make her chest tighten like that. She does not know whose wedding she had attended. 

She does not feel connected to any of it.

 

 

 

 

In Cartagena, the man she is to apprehend is shot dead in front of her. 

The man she is to apprehend has his hands around her neck and then he doesn’t, his fingers tightening around her throat with the impact and then slackening with the fall.

There is a knife in her right hand.

There is a recently fired gun in Casey’s.

He looks like he’s seen a ghost. 

She looks like she is one, pale and thin and tired.

 

 

 

 

“Walker.”

_I think he misses you._

“Colonel.”

 

 

 

 

She is alone.

She is alone and then –

 

 

 

 

**f o u r**

 

 

 

In Bogota, he happens upon a group of miscreants who hail from Costa Gravas. 

“Angel de la Muerte,” the eldest regards, the one the twin brothers call _cousin_ , though any visible blood relation is tenuous at best, and there is respect there, both in his tone and the lowering of his gun.

Casey holds tight to his own.

“My uncle speaks highly of you,” he adds, and the question of lineage can be further inferred from the pre-revolution cigars he smokes. 

 

 

 

 

For a while, he runs with them.

For a while, he endures the in-fighting of the brothers, the abrasive silence of the fourth, unrelated party, and finds intrigue, if nothing else, from the eldest. He’s a sociopath, no question about it, but playing the villain lost its thrill sometime back, so he switched teams and the others followed blindly as he turned them into a band of glorified bounty hunters with questionable methods, the answer to the dangerously incompetent local policía.

It’s just enough of a moral gray area that Casey can rest easy at night.

It’s just enough. 

 

 

 

 

He has forgotten how to fly solo. 

He has forgotten how not to look to his left, to his right.

He has gone _soft_. 

And he is drifting. 

 

 

 

 

“You can always come back, dad,” she says, when his calls have gone from weekly to bimonthly, when she’s leaving him voicemails edged in panic and he can hear the catch in her voice every time he picks up. 

He has not told her about Gertrude. 

He has not told her about this new set of circumstances.

Nevertheless, she has stopped asking, has taken it upon herself to coax him back, and he hasn’t yet found the heart to tell her that she’s knocking her fists up against a brick wall.

 

 

 

 

(“And Walker?” He asks, once, too much time gone by since the last update.

She goes quiet on the line.

Her answer, or lack thereof, is neither unexpected nor unwelcome. 

It’s what he needs to hear, the final sinking admission that, yes, this is over. 

You can’t return to what isn’t there.)

 

 

 

 

“You can always come back.”

“I’m fine.”

 

 

 

 

The Premier’s nephew shoots one of the brothers in the head in retaliation for a job gone wrong. 

Casey takes the money he suspects they picked up in a robbery shortly before he came along, dumps it into a metal trashcan on the street, and sets the whole damn thing on fire. 

And then moves on. 

 

 

 

 

Cartagena is meant to be a pit stop but there is a woman in an alleyway and a man whose hands are around her neck, her feet dangling two inches off the ground and her hands fighting to loosen his grip before flailing behind her, what he initially believes to be an effort to find purchase on the wall behind her but what is, in all actuality, a grab for her weapon.

She is holding a knife and the man falls to the ground with a bullet in his head. 

Sarah stares back at him. 

 

 

 

 

_We became friends_ , he had said, and she had tightened her grip on the knife, had twisted it.

 

 

 

 

He is drifting.

He is drifting and then –

 

 

 

 

**f i v e**

 

 

“Here’s how this is going to work – “

He lowers his weapon before she can finish her sentence. 

 

 

 

 

She wants to cry but all she can do is cough up blood that speckles the brick wall and the front of her shirt. 

 

 

 

 

He kneels beside her.

He kneels beside her and his hand comes to rest on her shoulder, dirt mixed with sweat that smears and colors the skin there, where his hand rubs circles. 

 

 

 

She makes the necessary phone calls. 

She omits the necessary names. 

“We’re pulling you out, Agent Walker,” the director – Graham’s replacement – says. 

“Actually, sir – “

 

 

 

 

He is no less a stranger to her than he was the day he left.

The difference is, she has spent the better part of a year surrounded by strangers, and there is still that unexplainable pull to him, that sensation that insists that this was once a safe place to lean. He was once a safe person to lean on. 

“Always with the knives,” he says, and if the words are meant to carry meaning, if they are meant to refer to a specific time, a specific moment, then it is lost on her. But he had expected that. She can see in his eyes that not only had he expected it, he is unmoved by it. 

He does not say _remember that_.

He expects nothing of her memory, content with the history that lives in his own head, content with burying it six feet under where it can’t get to him. 

The rules for this particular playing field are different.

 

 

 

 

(A memory uncovered, briefly:

Her body pressed against glass. 

His body pressed against hers.

Her neck in the crook of his arm, her hands wrapped around his forearm, the sore feeling in her muscles, limbs, jaw. 

“I’ll be fine, promise,” he’d told her. 

She has no other context for this moment in time.

She does not know what to make of it. 

She does not know why the simple remembrance of those words makes her heart seize in her chest.)

 

 

 

 

 

He takes her back to his hotel room.

She goes, willingly, sits on his bed while he brings her aspirin and bottled water, forces her hands to unclench and her body to relax. Does not flinch when he sits next to her, when he stares straight ahead like he’s bracing himself for something. 

She doesn’t know how to do this. 

He doesn’t seem to either. 

 

 

 

 

**s i x**

 

 

 

He is a man of simple things and few words. 

He is a man who believes that actions speak louder, who didn’t tell his daughter he loved her until it was almost too late, who never managed to look his partner in the eye and tell her that she was the best damn one he ever had when it would’ve still meant something, who could not admit that he had changed, that there were people and places and things that he needed, to anyone but himself. 

He didn’t have the words then.

He sure as hell doesn’t have them now. 

 

 

 

 

What he does have: 

“I missed you, Walker.”

 

 

 

 

**s e v e n**

 

 

 

_We became friends_ , he’d said, and the expression on his face had spelled out loss quite clearly. 

She feels the words now, where she hadn’t felt them then.

She feels _something_. 

 

 

 

 

“I think I missed you too, John.”

 

 

 

 

_fin._


End file.
